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Dear East Valley Community,

What an amazing start to the 2026-27 school year! The positive energy from staff and students as they returned to our buildings in late August has set the tone for a great first few weeks of the year. As I’m around the buildings, seeing this energy in every aspect of the day to day interactions makes me confident this will propel us to another excellent school year.

As we welcomed our students back to our buildings to begin a new year, we continued our intentional focus on planning student activities that foster positive relationships and a sense of belonging to their school. Our vision for the experience of every one of our EVSD students is something we believe is the key to ensuring high levels of success by all. Research shows that students who feel a strong connection to their school are more likely to attend regularly, more likely to experience academic success, and less likely to engage in challenging behaviors. We plan to continue to incorporate activities with this focus throughout the school year and into our everyday practices, both in our classrooms and across the schools.

With the beginning of a new year comes optimism and opportunity to continue to support excellence, and improvement towards excellence, both for each individual student and our schools as a whole. As part of that work, this year we are focused on strengthening the units of study in our classrooms. This work consists of ensuring students are engaged in instructional activities that align with learning target progressions of essential standards, have regular opportunities to show their progress towards meeting proficiency of those essential standards, and we are responding to what we see in the evidence of learning to adjust accordingly to meet the specific needs of our students. This work, in turn, will create a stronger, more focused approach on ensuring best practices are being implemented in the classroom regularly to increase the likelihood of reaching proficiency in the skills they must master for future success. In addition, we are eager to continue to grow our systems of support to meet the needs of our students and strengthen the connections with our families. We continue to invest in professional development to grow the skills of our staff and provide several opportunities to invite families into our schools. Through our work together, we can build a system of support that will lead to high levels of learning for all of our students and ensure their future success.

I look forward to seeing you out in our schools and community and having the chance to talk in person.

Superintendent of East Valley Schools